Around the theatre web for Saturday, March 1st…
What a fun morning. We were evacuated onto the CTA tracks when the southbound Red and Purple line tracks between at least Loyola and Granville lost power. We walked the block/half-block to the Granville station on the northbound Red Line tracks. My son loved it. Video of getting off the train here, and if you are really bored and want to hear me blathering on and laughing inanely to make sure my son thought this was fun, click here for the walk down the tracks. (The lovely blond woman holding his hand is my wife)
Now lets look around the web:
First off, the investigation into Palo Alto Children’s Theatre apparently stretches back into the 1990’s:
[Leon] Kaplan said one day in mid-November there was a knock on his office door, and Sgt. Michael Yore, accompanied by a forensic accountant, announced he was conducting a criminal investigation “and I was going to be surprised by what I was going to hear.”
He said Yore informed him of a theft in June and said that “red flags” began surfacing, with additional items turning up missing, including traveler’s checks.
Kaplan said there were four lines of questioning: the revamping of the theater 15 or more years ago; annual pre-Halloween sales of old costumes by the Friends group to raise funds for the theater; trips Briggs and other staff took the young actors on, to places such as Ashland, Ore., or Los Angeles; and a blank purchase order with Kaplan’s signature that turned up in a search.
Nick Keenan follows up on Time Out Chicago’s bloggers vs. Bailiwick article with some discussion of his personal experiences there, and tips for freelancers and theatres on how to reduce the chance of problems:
…this kind of issue doesn’t simply exist at the Bailiwick – it’s an industry-wide problem of theaters that are taking advantage of the semi-pro semi-volunteers that work for them. And it’s very rarely a case of the big malicious theater exploiting the unsuspecting artist. It’s more about the consequences of willful ignorance. Most theater managers, Zak included, have the absolute best of intentions and they truly believe they are providing artists with opportunities and reasonable access to the industry. This is a problem of miscommunication leading to unintentional exploitation.
If you missed it, I also posted a follow-up to the article three days ago.
Maybe its something in the water, since a Buffalo theatre had also tried this: Toronto’s CanStage has laid off several employees due to rising debt.
In a development that may be related to CanStage’s financial difficulties, artistic director David Storch announced his resignation last Wednesday after less than eight months on the job.
Many Canadian theatre companies struggle with their finances, because plays can be expensive to mount and it’s difficult to maintain loyal audiences.
But theatre critic Lynn Slotkin said the CanStage management lacks focus.
CanStage has abandoned its commitment to staging more intellectual plays, in favour of more popular productions such as the musical Little Shop of Horrors and Misery, based on a Stephen King story, she said.
Then again, maybe it’s not the water after all. Bozeman, Montana’s Equinox Theatre Company is also in dire financial straits:
Faced with the unexpected loss of two grants that had in the past proven steady sources of income, along with an ongoing legal fight with a California production company that allegedly failed to pay Equinox close to $10,000 for shows it did across the region, the theater needs $31,000 to avoid closing its doors this spring.
“We really may not survive if we don’t get the support that we need,” said Laura Concord, the theater’s managing director.
The financial impact of the grant losses and the ongoing legal battle are exacerbated by economic conditions, Concord said.
“Some of our large- and medium-size donors have had to back off this year because the economy is just not strong,” Concord said. “We’re all getting hit. If our private donors are not able to give as much, and a few fewer people show up for the shows, it all ads up to a big ding for a small operation like us.”
While the amount Equinox needs is a mere pittance compared to the debt of CanStage or Studio Arena Theatre, they will still be forced to lay off their small staff and close their doors in late March if the money is not raised.
Playbill.com has an Ask Playbill section, which this time attempted to explain call times for actors and stagehands to the general public:
Typically, the first thing you do when you see that an actor hasn’t checked in is make sure the actor isn’t in the building and simply forgot. “What you do is page ‘Joe Smith, we’re at half hour, if you’re here please let a stage manager know,’ and a phone will ring or someone will holler from the stage door, and they’re embarrassed, but they’re there,” Mont says.
Technically, if an actor is not there at half hour, the management has the right to not let an actor go on. “Truthfully, that’s rather archaically strict,” Mont says, and many stage managers give leeway.
Finally: Earlier this week I mentioned that my day was probably going to suck. Here’s what was going on (and still isn’t quite finalized):
My wife’s car wouldn’t start Monday morning, due to an old unused alarm system suddenly deciding to arm itself and disable the electrical system (we had the siren for it removed years ago). We had the car towed to the shop to have the security system removed so this would never happen again. I picked my wife of from work that night, and after taking care of some business and getting a bite to eat, we went to pick up the car.
The shop was closed, but they left the car parked on the street with the key locked in it so we could pick it up. It had snowed about 4 inches in the two hours before we got there, and when we arrived she discovered that someone had gone too fast around the corner and plowed into the back driver’s side of her car. It looked like a hit and run, but after we called the police we found a note in the snow with a phone number that was to a company just down the street, saying to call about the damage.
Unfortunately, it took a great deal of time for them to figure out which of their vehicles had been in an accident, and we were predisposed to be wary of them (since their vehicle hit her car). It did not help matters that they were difficult to get a hold of, or get any information from. My wife had to take a day off from work to deal with insurance and repair estimates. As the cost to repair the damage was greater than the pre-crash value of the car, she told them she wanted the pre-crash value of the car paid to her so she would have a down payment for another car. She ended up getting a new (used) car that day, which is quite nice and I will post a photo later, but it wasn’t until yesterday that she finally got a check for the old one (and had to take another half-day from work to do that). Unfortunately, she left her purse in their office while she was there yesterday, and they closed early, and can’t make any arrangements to meet until Sunday. So we will still be dealing with them longer than they or us would like.
While we are obviously happy that no-one was hurt, and that we were nowhere near the car when it was hit, dealing with this was incredibly annoying overall. It was an avoidable accident that we were in no way responsible for, that will effect our finances for several years to come. The old car was ours, free and clear. Now we have car payments and higher insurance (better car) we had not planned for. It was also hard on a personal level, as that was her first car: it took us on our honeymoon to Colorado, and it brought our son home from the hospital after he was born (not to mention being the car that I drove my wife to the hospital with when she went into labor, in full “panicked-father-to-be” mode).
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Well, that is a depressing/grumpy way to end this post, so I’ll include this link to the Cloud Appreciation Society. Clouds for the people who love them…
Hudson & Gaines
